This weekend, I spent an unpleasant 24 hours or so working on upgrading a client’s server to Leopard 10.5.5. The actual Leopard upgrade went pretty well on the G5 XServe. The secret to that was having a crossover cable, and knowing the specific RackMac system identifier to be able to get the IP address to SSH into. The problems started with ColdFusion.

Now I am going to rant. My client has an Enterprise license, so we aren’t running on some hacked up installation, we are running a major OS that has been on the market for about a year, it has been in the hands of developers for more than a year. That there isn’t a proper connector bundled with the installation is criminal. If I wanted to go hacking around inside of source code, building crap, I could run open source. Why did we pay so much money for this? I will not write any more private applications with ColdFusion. If a corporation wants me to build ColdFusion applications, I may, but only after I try to convince them to go with something that is more likely to be supported on UNIX / Mac OS X.

I mean, how long has Apache 2 64-bit been out there, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to Adobe. I can’t trust that they will support major platforms going into the future. This is because of one or both of two things. The first possibility is that Adobe doesn’t want to put money into ColdFusion because it is dead or dying, the second is that Adobe wants to force people to upgrade to ColdFusion 8 by any means necessary. What Adobe has done is to make me look bad in front of my clients for choosing a technology that was not supported. I have already begun to write my applications in RoR, now I am definitely going to write my applications in RoR. I am done. I could have made so much more money writing code instead of screwing around with compiler flags.

The problem is that I would expect to run into trouble installing or running my software when using OSS. That comes with the territory, but when you buy software and it claims to support the platform, one would reasonably assume that the platform would be fully and actively supported. Anyway, rant over.

Now I will show how I fixed the problem:

First:

If you have a standalone installation (the only one that works), you will need to start it by switching to your ColdFusion directory, if you followed the defaults, it will be /Applications/ColdFusionMX7/runtime/bin. You will need to issue the JRun command from here ./jrun -start coldfusion. This will work, if you try to start it any other way, you will get the THIS_PROCESS_HAS_FORKED errors.

If you have installed it in multi-server, you are screwed, I have not found any decent way to get this to work.

Now run the connector configuration:
sudo java -jar /Applications/JRun4/lib/wsconfig.jar

After it finishes, run this command:
cp /Applications/JRun4/lib/src/connectors/src/mod_jrun22.so /Applications/JRun4/lib/wsconfig/1/mod_jrun22.so

sudo apachectl restart

The order of the files to be compiled is *IMPORTANT* I was working on a Dual-G5 2.3 GHz so my command was /usr/sbin/apxs -c -Wc,-arch -Wc,ppc64 -Wl,-arch -Wl,ppc64 -n jrun22 mod_jrun22.c jrun_maptable_impl.c jrun_property.c jrun_session.c platform.c jrun_mutex.c jrun_proxy.c jrun_utils.c.

You will get some warnings, you can ignore them. If you get an error saying something about functions that start with an underscore in your apache error logs, when you try to start it, you have the file names in the wrong order. If you see an error that says it found the module, and it is mach-o, but it is the wrong architecture, you are probably using -WI (I as in imitate) instead of Wl (l as in Larry).

Step 3:

Make sure to add the add handler to your httpd.conf. in the ifmodule for mod_jrun22.so. Mine did not install this by default, so my ColdFusion templates were coming up with the code showing up as plain text. Here is the default handler: AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm .cfml .cfc .cfr .cfswf.

I hope this prevents anyone from going through the ridiculous configuration nightmare that I went through this weekend. I apologize for the rant, but I have some other cool projects that I would rather work on than spending forever hacking around with my application server.